After watching the video for ‘Duck and Cover’ and about half of the movie, I did what I figured would be the most accurate thing to fully understand the thought of a nuclear catastrophe from this older viewpoint.
I asked my mother.
She was a child during the sixties and though she doesn’t really remember the big what if that was the Cuban Missile Crisis, she does distinctly remember the feeling of terror in those days. She told me of that fear hanging over them like a cloud, even in the Dominican Republic, but they never really had drills as shown in the ‘Duck and Cover’ video. Like most bad things that happened in the islands, if something happened, it happened and they would just have to move on from it if possible. What I found most interesting was the fact that more than anything, she expressed the belief that most everyone at that time were bracing themselves for when the Russians struck, for when they decided to make the first move. Being in the western hemisphere, they were almost too sure that the United States wouldn’t be the ones to fire the first bomb, to initiate the conflict.
My mother did assure me that they all thought that the US would sure respond to anything sent their way by the communists, at the least. Whether this was to reassure me or to simply relay to me the faith they had and still have in the United State, I don’t know. I really do want to bring this back to the global context it needs to be put in. The two big powers during the Cold War were in fact the United State and the former Soviet Union but they weren’t the only nations in jeopardy but like Bert the Turtle showed us, it wasn’t only about the adults even if they were making the calls [I was laughing way too hard during the call between the presidents, by the way]. We saw the disregard that the General had for the civilian lives on the other side, how he easily discussed losing 150 people versus something million, and not even figuring in how many of those would be children. I remember fire drills in elementary school and even the lone earthquake drill but probably more than anything, I remember how my teacher didn’t know what to tell us what to do when we saw the smoke from the Twin Towers on 9-11. It wasn’t a nuclear bomb but it was an attack and there was no pamphlet, no set of instructions for it, probably what we could’ve imagined to do might’ve been wrong and useless, just like the duck and cover exercise against a nuclear bomb. I’ve lost what I wanted to say by now but it’s just too big to think about, if you try to. You can theorize and you can do the math and the physics behind it but in actuality, there’s not one thing you can immediately do to be okay if it happened and I don’t know if the false hope inspired by getting under a table if all that wrong or not. I think that’d be better than just staring at the sky getting dark and not having a single thing in mind.
